Working on the Simply DeliciousCookbook Project with Jamie has given me an opportunity to learn and expand my culinary palette. As with a lot of these dishes, I have never tried 3-19: Soupe Saint Germain before. This soup is made with ingredients I generally enjoy, but the end product was hardly enjoyable. The sparkling white wine was probably my least favorite component of the dish and not something I normally drink.

To the best of my recollection, I haven’t eaten many other classicFrenchsoups. My version of this dish may have been less than stellar due to a less than fresh bottle of sparkling white wine and my substitution of sour cream for cream.

Editor’s note:Potage St. Germain is essentially “pea soup”. There’s many variations out there, but not too many with sparkling wine in them. Since it’s New Years’ Eve, here’s an interesting alternative for all that Champagne you may have on hand…Happy New Year and we’ll see you in 2018! 🥂

Polynesian-style spareribs are my second or third favorite preparation of spareribs. As I described when I wrote 7-16: Orange-Glazed Spareribs, my grandmother’s recipe for Barbecue Spareribs still can’t be beat. However, these ginger and pineapple glazed ribs are more than acceptable. My dish came out of the oven tender and delicious, and maybe a little burnt from cooking too close to the broiler.

This meal is indeed, delectable, as described by the editors of Simply Delicious. I served this dish at a time of the year when corn-on-the-cob was not in season so my final plate looks a little different. The bright yellow corn would provide a nice contrast to the dark ribs on the plate.

Sticky post to inform new and returning readers of the following developments:

Site/server was compromised by some overambitious Bitcoin miners in mid-November 2017–we just got back online about mid-December 2017 (down for about a month). For more information, consult this entry.

Lost ALL images hosted by the site itself, but I still have them locally–working on rehosting/relinking images as we speak.

If you find yourself on a page with a (temporarily) missing recipe and you would like to see it, email me at simplydeliciouscookbook AT gmail DOT com and I’ll help you out.

I’ll update this page as progress is made. As of now (12/19/2017, 2 PM PST), the site is up, but there are still many recipes missing pictures. We have started posting new recipes however–check them out on the side bar or under this stickied post.

UPDATE – 12/23/2017, 6:15 PMPST – All entries from 2014 have been fixed. Starting on 2015…

UPDATE #3 – 1/11/2018, 9:45 AM PST – Still working on 2016, also fixing any entries that I see are getting hits, so there are scattered ones throughout 2016-17 that are also fixed. I haven’t given up–life (and a full-time job) just gets in the way sometimes.

UPDATE #4 – 1/20/2018, 3:45 PM PST – Jumped ahead to 2017 since that had less entries–all entries from 2017 have been fixed. Now to finish 2016…

UPDATE #5 – 1/29/2018, 2:45 PM PST – Still plugging away on 2016–I’ve fixed all of January through July, and a few scattered ones from August through December. Goal is to be done with it by the end of January, which gives me about 2 days to try to finish it up. Fingers crossed…

UPDATE #6 – 02/01/2018, 10:30 PM PST – Finally done! A day later than my goal, but that’s not bad. All entries from 2016 have been fixed, and with that, ALL entries have now officially been fixed. I’m unstickying this post, and filing it away as one hell of a learning experience.

Playing a bit of catch-up here since unscheduled interruptions, other non-food-related projects, and massive amounts of holiday baking have put me far behind in terms of keeping up with posts. I had started working on a Bread Series, starting with 18-1: Basic Yeast Dough I which I published back in October. Covering 20-12: Basic Rolls was intended to play off of that concept, giving you an easy recipe to utilize the lessons presented in both that post and its follow-up, 18-2: Basic Yeast Dough II.

Quick review: the last three chapters of Simply Delicious are part of its Cooking School, intended to review basic techniques, ingredients, and recipes with which all aspiring chefs should be familiar. I’ve covered a few bits and bobs out of those last few chapters, but much of it still remains untapped.

Spareribs are one of my favorite cuts of pork. I have fond childhood memories of my mother’s spareribs recipe that she got from her mother. I know it sounds cliché, using a recipe handed down from your mother’s mother, but I still use that recipe to this day. 7-16: Orange-Glazed Spareribs is not quite my grandmother’s recipe, but it gets the job done.

The set dressing in the example photo is amazing. The mug full of beer and the basket full of oranges give an incredible ambiance to the scene. My photography is more utilitarian and I don’t spend nearly as much time setting up a beautiful background, mostly because I’m starving by the time I’ve got my plate ready to snap the final plate photo.

A few weeks ago, I noticed the back-end stats of the website going wonky (insane amount of processes running, constant downtime notifications), and after some rudimentary detective work, I figured out that my site/space was being used for Bitcoin mining. My guess is they got in through a unsecured, out-of-date WordPress plug-in. Those SQL injections will get you every time.

I killed the site to stop the mining/resource hogging until I could figure out how to fix everything. Given the circumstances of the attack, we were able to save a lot of it (the posts, the overall structure, and the basic, un-tweaked version of the theme), but some aspects had to be dumped to ensure we got rid of every last bit of the bad code.

Unfortunately, one of the things we lost were any pictures hosted by the site itself. We had been working on moving pictures off to other storage spaces and re-linking them due to hitting my host’s space limits already, but I’d only made it up to about mid-2015 by the time we got hacked. My apologies for any recipes/pages you hit that have no pictures on them right now–I’ll be spending a lot of time over the next few weeks re-linking/uploading all the pictures for the posts. I have them all on my laptop, but I basically need to reconstruct about 2.5 years worth of work.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to say goodbye to over 3.5 years worth of work, time, and effort. I’m very lucky to have been able to save any of it, and even more lucky that it wasn’t worse.

Lessons learned:

Don’t use a ton of WordPress plug-ins, and if you do–make sure they’re trustworthy, secure, and updated often.

Watch your stats like a hawk–I could have caught this earlier, but I wasn’t paying close attention until the “SITE DOWN” emails started flooding in.

Don’t just delete things willy-nilly when trying to stop the bleeding–I deleted an important database file when I was frantically trying to bring the site down and it cost me an extra week or so in downtime to repair that mistake.

BACK UP your site in multiple places–it’s an old IT saying: it doesn’t exist if there’s not at least two copies of it.

Backups helped in this case, but not entirely–the bad code was throughout the site, restoring blindly from a backup would have just started the problem over again. However, it’s still a VERY good idea, since we were able to pull the posts and some of the other essential parts out safely.

Thanks for sticking with me throughout my trials and tribulations. I’ll be getting back on track here shortly. Stay tuned!